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The Emancipation of Selena Gomez

Once known more for her relationships with Barney the dinosaur and Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez has broken free of all of that prehistoric shit with a sexy, smash-hit album and new films with Seth Rogen and James Franco (not to mention a planet-Earth-leading 74 million Instagram followers). But here's what we really love about her: She survived the car wreck of child fame—the trolls and the paparazzi, the bad breakups and the exhaustion—and emerged from it, well, more human than ever.

Selena Gomez isn’t really the type to name-drop, but she’s got a Diddy story she likes to tell. It’s not much of a story, actually—more like an anecdote. It’s about one of those nights you have when you’re Selena Gomez, “when you’re around four people and everybody has the champagne glass, and somebody says something and they laugh but they didn’t say a joke.” Fame—a.k.a. daily life for Selena Gomez—is “that situation all the time.”

“Or when P. Diddy gave me his valet ticket once. Do you know what I mean?”

Wait, no, I don’t—why did he give you his valet ticket?

“Because he thought I was the valet lady.”

What?!

“Yeah.”

Yeah. What a surreal life she’s already led. Try to imagine it for a second. A life determined largely by decisions she made when she was a teenager—enormous, consequential choices to first become a child actress, rictus-grinning on Barney (a decision she made circa age 10), then signing up as a Disney company player on Wizards of Waverly Place (a decision she made circa age 15), and then, finally, to date fellow child star Justin Bieber (a decision she made circa age 18), a seemingly innocent young man who went from fresh-faced YouTube star to heavily tattooed mop-bucket-urinator in the four on-and-off years of their courtship. Imagine one day—and this happened just a few weeks ago to Selena Gomez—you become the most followed person on all of Instagram. Seventy-four million followers! Who are all those people?! Some of them are fans from way back, mostly young women. There’s an unsettlingly large contingent of adult men, whose motivations she surely would prefer not to think about. Also bots. So many bots! Selena Gomez is drowning in bots.

Selena Gomez is also drowning in attention. I know, I know. All of us here in the celebrity-industrial complex we call America have learned to be especially skeptical of famous people who complain or otherwise seem uncomfortable with their fame, right? We have decided, as a society, not to let folks have it both ways. But Selena’s a throwback. She’s got angry ‘90s-alt-rock blood running through her Disney veins. Remember Fiona Apple? Trembling on an MTV stage, saying “This world is bullshit” while clutching a 1997 Best New Artist Moonman as if it were the monkey’s paw? That’s Selena. Young and absurdly talented and here to tear the system down, despite being a stone-cold product of it. Because she’s a stone-cold product of it.

Imagine your early 20s, trying desperately to shed your old skin, as people in their early 20s do, in order to become a new, more complex and more interesting person. Imagine trying to live down rehab—which she either did or did not go to, more on that later—as well as a debilitating auto-immune disease, lupus, which she was diagnosed with three years ago. Imagine trying to do this while scores of people—a multimillion-dollar gossip industry, quote-unquote fans, journalists who resemble the one typing this sentence—keep tossing buckets of your old life at you like the pig’s-blood scene in Carrie.

In the past year, she’s released an addictive, convincingly louche album, Revival, which still had two singles lingering in the Top 10 as recently as February; she also made a killer blackjack-table cameo in The Big Short, announced her own TV series with Netflix and Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, and is about to star in Neighbors 2. And all that’s fine. Impressive, even.

But I want to make the argument that what’s most interesting about Selena Gomez right now, in 2016, is that—despite the plastic, unreal world from which she comes—she’s working her hardest to become a socially maladroit weirdo. A human, in other words. A human who would probably gently suffocate the last living northern white rhino if it guaranteed she didn’t have to be a public figure anymore. Or at least, a public figure at the titanic scale at which she’s a public figure.

She’s spent the past year and a half being roommates with, for lack of a better word, civilians—Courtney (a non-profit employee!) and Ashley (a real estate broker!). They had a house in Calabasas and did normal shit: watched movies, had sleepovers. This is a person who lived in a loft in Los Angeles as an aspiring child star—her and her mother, Demi Lovato and her mother, a whole gang of other assorted kids trying to make it, all living together in downtown L.A., back when downtown L.A. had 100 percent fewer Sugarfishes. She spent every formative year of her life with no access at all to normality, and so she is just now rebuilding it from scratch, like HAL 9000 taking back the Discovery, savoring every hard-won ordinary thing the way her peers savor Grammys and Maybachs.

Postmates! She says the word with fervor, relishes her newfound ability to use a food-delivery service, now that she and Courtney have recently moved back into the city from Calabasas. (Ashley, who is older, got her own place in a bid for adult independence.) Meanwhile she talks about fame and her interactions with other famous people in the deeply traumatized way that Marco Rubio will someday describe his year running for president.

“It’s either of two extremes,” she says. “Either you’re going to succumb to it and be surrounded by all the noise and enjoy it and get the rush from it, or you’re going to be so far off of it because you don’t trust anyone or think any of it’s genuine. That’s the girl that I am.”

Which brings us back to the time Diddy handed her his valet ticket.

“Look, I see all of it. I don’t care—I actually laughed hysterically when it happened. But I get it. I know what all of it is.”

She’s trying to think of her favorite David O. Russell movie. The one with Ben Stiller, she says. Talking about movies seems to have the same effect on Selena Gomez as a shot of espresso; she almost starts vibrating. She takes out her phone and scrolls through her library—she’s got like a hundred movies on her phone. She scrolls past Clueless and The Devil Wears Prada and Fight Club. Then she finds it—“Flirting with Disaster!”

One obstacle that remains, she says, is her face. It’s so round and Raphaelite that she might as well be peering out of the corner of the Sistine Madonna. “I’m young, and I look younger. I can play like I’m 16 still. Doesn’t really work for the things I want to do.”

We are talking in an empty room at a bowling alley. This is a fact of life for Selena Gomez, doing business in big empty rooms—I know this because it’s all we’ve been talking about for most of the week, prior to meeting up. Where could we go to have a conversation, unmolested? Ideas were floated: My hovel of a home. A whale-watching boat. The front seat of a moving vehicle. Ultimately, Selena Gomez decided the only tenable place for us to meet was here. Hollywood and Highland, center of Los Angeles, one of the most culturally vital cities in the history of global civilization, and we are in a bowling alley on a Friday afternoon, not bowling. It’s like we’ve been hermetically sealed inside a 16-year-old’s birthday party. We both have little bottles of water, as if to emphasize the colorless, tasteless force field around us. This is maybe what sensory-deprivation tanks are like.

She says she wishes they still made movies like Flirting with Disaster, which is a disturbingly rational thing for a 23-year-old to say about a movie made in 1996. She says she knows it’s an uphill climb from here, but if she could work with any director, it’d be Russell. Him or David Fincher, which feels meaningful, because Fincher is maybe the only director working right now who is (reportedly, at least) more demanding and intimidating than David O. Russell.

“I know he’s got a reputation for being intense,” she says of Russell.

I bring up a recent story about Amy Adams weeping on one of his sets. She knows the story better than I do, it turns out. It was on the set of—

“American Hustle,” Selena says, before I can finish the sentence.

Yeah. She said she cried every day.

“She said: Not every day, but most days,” Selena says, correcting me again.

What do you think it says about you that you read that story and you’re like, “Yeah, I need to work with that guy”?

“Because I saw her performance,” Gomez says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She looks so happy and so focused, saying this.

“There’s a deleted scene that’s not even in the movie that I think is her best scene that she’s ever done. It’s five minutes long, and it’s her hysterically crying and laughing at the same time, and it’s so beautiful. Because I know—I mean, I don’t know—but I know what maybe happened for her to get there. And it was fucking amazing. It was beautiful.”

Her hair is as glossy as a dolphin’s tail. She’s got on a snug neutral-color sweater that she’s sweating through—it’s evident, you can see the twin damp patches that people like Selena Gomez aren’t supposed to have. She keeps apologizing for it, which is heartbreaking, as if she needs to ask for permission to be human like the rest of us.

She’s already been in more than a dozen movies, some of them quite good—think of her in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, a film she’s immensely proud of, torn between God and James Franco—but she talks about her movie career as though it’s only now really beginning. One obstacle that remains, she says offhandedly, is her face. And it’s true. She looks like a child in a painting; her face is so round and Raphaelite that she might as well be peering skeptically out of the corner of the Sistine Madonna. It’s given her a lot in life, her face: She acknowledges that. But she’s also sort of done with it. “I’m young, and I look younger. So the roles that I want to go for, it’s all about how the face is. I can play like I’m 16 still. Doesn’t really work for the things I want to do.”

What are the things you want to do?

“I want to have an experience that I would go a little bit stir-crazy with. I like people pushing a little bit.”

Around this point, she excuses herself to use the bathroom and leaves her phone behind, and there’s something so trusting about that gesture, so simple and nonchalant, that I find myself thinking about it days later. It’s guileless in a way that’s almost frightening, and at the same time a kind of deeply considered “fuck you”—I dare you.

One lesson from Spring Breakers: A man will always end up with the credit. Many of the accolades for that film, and for Gomez’s performance in it, accrued to its director, Harmony Korine, chiefly for having the idea of casting Gomez in the first place. (“Harmony wanted an innocence because he thought it would be creepier,” Gomez said at the time. “I agree with him.”) Gomez was and is fine with this; she characterizes the exploitation on that film as “mutual”—Korine got her, but she got Korine, a deal she would do again if offered.

Other experiences have been less mutual. Part of her fatigue with celebrity is that, for a long time, much of hers was refracted—she was famous for dating Justin Bieber, or for having been a cog in the Disney machine. For years, she says, the gist of every interview she did would be about subjects other than, well, herself. Revival, which came out late last year, was meant to be an assertion of independence. (The first words Gomez sings are these: I feel like I’ve awakened lately / The chains around me are finally breaking.) It’s a solo record in the truest sense; Gomez invited only one featured guest, the rapper A$AP Rocky, who appears on *Revival’*s first single, “Good for You,” a breathy come-on of a song that hints at what makes Gomez most interesting artistically. This was a move straight out of the young-pop-star template that somehow managed to feel real, raw, even a little uncertain. She’s the ghost in the machine when it comes to this stuff: She takes the typical, scripted thing and makes it jarringly human.

In October, Gomez was on the cover of Billboard, and Rocky is quoted in the story as saying, well…

Did you read your Billboard profile?

“The one where I was on the cover? Yeah.”

Did you read Rocky’s quote in it?

Gomez looks puzzled. “What did he say?”

So I read her the quote: “ ‘She’s developing her sexiness,’ says the Harlem MC, who didn’t recognize Gomez when he heard the demo. ‘I don’t think she’s there 100 percent yet. She’s probably only fucked Justin Bieber, if that.’ He snickers. ‘But honestly, she wasn’t looking for a No. 1 hit. She did it to excommunicate herself from her image. That’s brave.’ ”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well, I mean, I don’t know. I just think that’s kind of who he is. And I mean, I made him feel like he has a right to kind of have his own opinion. What am I going to say?”

I would think it’d be hurtful to have a collaborator come out and talk authoritatively about who you did or did not have sex with.

“I’ve had worse things said about me.”

It doesn’t bother you to hear him taking credit, on some level, for what’s risky or interesting about that song?

“Well, I don’t think people really look at it that way. I don’t know. My label didn’t want it to be the first single. It was kind of a little bit more of a risk, and he mentioned that when I sent him the track. It was like, ‘At least you’re fucking doing it. That’s cool.’ I think that was literally verbatim. He was like, ‘This is cool that she’s actually doing it.’ ”

And here’s the thing, she says: Rocky really did help rewrite the song. “He kind of did his thing with it, and he restructured the bridge completely. And I think he completely elevated the song.” Then a hard look comes into her eyes. “But there’s two versions.” On the record, Rocky’s verse is included. But in the original video for the song—and often in the version that plays on the radio—Rocky’s verse is omitted.

“There’s one with me”—a long, deliberate pause—“and there’s one with him.”

We are having this conversation at a strange moment for Selena Gomez. It’s the first week of March, two years after many of the events that inspired Revival, five months after Revival itself. So she doesn’t want to talk about the past, even though a lot of what she’s doing now is a pretty clear reaction to it. But the story she’s told—or that’s been told for her, anyway—remains intriguingly hazy.

The public story went something like this: In January 2014, Gomez went to rehab, but not—according to her public-relations representative—“for substance abuse.” She then came out of rehab and promptly parted ways with her manager (her mother), her record label (Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records), and her landlord (also her mother). At some point during the year, she also dropped her boyfriend, Justin Bieber. She turned herself into an astronaut, orbiting her old life at a relieved, mournful distance. Then she signed to a new label, Interscope, and spent the rest of the year and part of 2015 writing and recording Revival, which is about—in a pointedly vague kind of way—this period of strife and turmoil.

Revival came out in October, and immediately Gomez was forced, as per magazine interviews such as this one, to relive the events that inspired the record. She talked a lot about finally figuring out who she was, and how nice that feeling felt. She talked about learning to call her own shots. And she offered a few clarifications: What had brought her to Meadows, an Arizona rehab facility, was not a drinking or drug problem but the auto-immune disease lupus. While everyone was speculating about a drug problem, she was getting chemotherapy, a common way to treat the disease.

I have no desire to make Gomez uncomfortable, but I am curious about a few things. For instance: Why go to a rehab facility for an auto-immune disease? Why tolerate vicious rumors for more than a year when a simple statement of fact would immediately make everyone desist with the wild and often cruel speculation about what was happening to her? But these are questions I never really get to ask.

This is delicate, but you began the year we’re talking about in rehab—

“No, no, no, no, no,” Gomez says, cutting me off. Here in the low light of the bowling alley, her face is as fluid and expressive as a mood ring, and her reaction to any given question is obvious long before she begins answering it. Frustration and disgust now pass across her features like bands of clouds. “First off, this is something that everyone always wants to fixate on. I got diagnosed with lupus. My mom had a very public miscarriage. So I had to cancel my tour. I needed time to just be okay. And I was going through leukemia”—I think she means chemotherapy here—“and I went to two different locations for those treatments. It’s really frustrating, because I am 100 percent allowed to have that, but I think people just want to have some sort of—”

She’s been patient, friendly enough, but now I can hear the pure anger in her voice. “We’re easy targets. Every single kid who was brought up like this is an easy target. It’s disgusting.”

She gathers herself. “I understand what you’re asking”—though I haven’t asked any of it yet—“but I’m just saying, I don’t think it really matters.” She pauses again. “My past seems to be way more fascinating for people than my future, which bums me out.”

Why do you think that is?

“I don’t know. Why do you care?”

I say I care because I’m interested in how she experienced what she experienced. In what it did to her. Being that sick that young, for instance—it’s remarkable, in the worst way a thing can be remarkable.

In response she tells me a story—the story of the first time she told a stranger about being diagnosed. I almost hesitate to retell it, because it’s an anecdote about a celebrity visiting a children’s hospital, which is a very admirable thing, but neither of us is naive, nor particularly inclined to live up to our respective clichés. But this is what Selena Gomez does. She somehow humanizes a celebrity doing a charity visit at a fucking children’s hospital. Finds the real thing inside of it. So here goes. She’s at the hospital.

“And there was this kid that wouldn’t look me in the eye at all. And I wear my emotions on my face, as you just have witnessed. And I don’t care, that’s who I am. I wanted to get his attention, even though maybe it was too much. So I just said, ‘Ask me anything you want.’ And he was the first person that I told, besides my best friend and family, because he asked me, ‘Have you ever dealt with anything like this?’ And I said, ‘I have lupus. I was in the ICU for two and a half weeks. I was in this exact same room.’ And it was the first time that he looked at me.”

She looks at me evenly, like: There it is, take it or leave it. “I don’t ever really like to sit and dwell on what that experience was,” she says wearily. “Was it fun? No. Is it fun to have it? No.”

She’s graceful enough not to remark on the fact that she’s only dwelling on it now because I’ve asked her to. Until later, at least, when I ask what I think is something more innocuous, about her and her friends.

That transition from being a relatively well-known teen star to being an adult—why is that so hard? What is the demon or darkness that’s waiting for you guys?

She’s been patient, controlled, friendly enough, but now I can hear the pure anger in her voice. “We’re easy targets. Every single kid who was brought up like this is an easy target. It’s disgusting, because it’s interesting to grown adults that these kids go through weird things because they’re figuring out, ‘Do I like this? Do I love this? Maybe I love this person. Oh, I’m exposed to this, people are reporting my every move and this and that because of Instagram and Twitter and you can find out everything.’ There’s a difference between being a fan—there’s a difference between that and what you have to do.”

It’s dawning on me that the you here is not generic, but very, very specific—she’s talking to me. The you who’s sitting in front of her, pushing mid-30s, asking her questions that she’d prefer not to answer, raising subjects that she’d prefer not to talk about.

Would you hit the fast-forward button on this phase of life, if you could?

“No, because I’m not that stupid. And I get it. I just have to be patient. It’s slowly dissolving the older I get. And I just have to be patient and make great things with quality, from producing to singing to acting. And one by one, I will be able to change the dialogue and people won’t care about everything that’s happened to me.”

She mentions in passing that she’s working with her mother, Mandy Teefey, again. Not in any managerial capacity, but as a production partner. They’re developing the young-adult novel 13 Reasons Why with Tom McCarthy and also working with Kevin Spacey’s production company on a show that Gomez describes as “Entourage meets Girls”—it’ll be about “what girls deal with, even the perception of religion and things like that, how it affects you, and how impressionable Hollywood is.”

It’s Teefey whom Gomez credits with making her the relatively sane, not-terrible person she is now. Her mother was only 16 when she had Selena—sometimes Gomez thinks about this fact, what it might be like to be a teen mother, as her mom had been. “It makes my stomach drop,” she says. Her mother gave her religion—Gomez is quiet but intense about her Christian faith—and also some ongoing hint of what it might’ve been like to be a normal person, growing up in Texas, far away from where she is now. I ask if she ever pictures that life, the one she’d have if she’d never left Texas, and she says yes: “I would’ve fallen in love and gone to school. I think I’d maybe be thinking of having a family and kids now, at 24, which would be this year. Yeah.”

That yeah comes out like something between a sigh and a prayer, the sound of impossibility.

There’s no equivalent template for where Gomez finds herself, of course, so she’s figuring out the way forward on her own, as she has with pretty much everything else in her life over the past year. A few weeks before we meet, she’d done Saturday Night Live for the first time. It was a snowy weekend in late January—Hamilton and Broadway and the rest of the city had been shut down, including the subway, but SNL still happened. All her friends came. She remembers gliding through the empty city, snow coming down, police escort leading the way. “All of the streets were covered, and not one car was out,” she says. “It was beautiful.”

She was performing her single “Hands to Myself,” in a little black slip that you can tell on TV she’s not entirely comfortable in. “I just remember being really nervous, and rehearsing it on the stage kind of freaked me out, and it got to me a little bit,” she says. You can sort of see this happen on TV: She comes out and you almost don’t know if she’s going to make it through. But she does, and at the end—look this up, it’s the most awesome thing—she collapses on the opulent round bed they’d brought out as part of the stage set and just bursts into laughter, there on the bed by herself, on national television.

What were you laughing about?

“I think I was a little petrified. And then when I was done and I did it, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m an idiot. Just have fun. It’s not like I’m saving the world by performing this song.’ It was one of those moments where I’m like: ‘Thank God.’ ”

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